Bible Project's Advice on Storytelling: How Two Guys Changed Education on YouTube
Tim Mackie has a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies. Jon Collins built his career making explainer videos for technology companies. In 2014, they created their first two animated videos about Scripture and put them online for free. The Bible Project now has over ten million YouTube subscribers and more than 500 million views.
Their advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, a Christianity Today profile, and their own discussions of process.
Scholar Plus Curious Student
The Bible Project's engine is a specific collaboration model. Mackie is the professor who has read the scholarship in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, German, French, Latin, and English. Collins is the hyper-curious student who never does the homework but always shows up engaged. "I can't take anything for granted," Mackie says. "Things I'm just assuming or gaps in my own learning - he'll be like, Wait, how'd you get from there to that?"
Collins does not accept logical bridges. He sniffs out inconsistencies. He demands clarity on the words being used. He will not take words for granted. "It bugs most people," he says, "but it doesn't bug Tim." The back-and-forth generates genuine discovery rather than rehearsed content. Mackie consistently finds that their ten to fifteen hours of dialogue reveals things he never thought about while preparing his notes.
The scripts capture both voices - literally. They write their personas into the script, each editing the other's lines. Collins will look at Mackie's dialogue and say, "No, you're smarter than that" - meaning the Tim persona, not just Tim. Mackie will look at Collins's questions and say, "No, the viewer already knows that, but they have a different question." The result is a condensed version of the learning journey - hours of conversation compressed into minutes - that models communal learning rather than expert pronouncement.
People ask Collins whether the podcast conversations are genuine or rehearsed. After eleven years of talking about the Bible together, he sometimes thinks he knows the answer before asking. But he forces himself to turn off what he calls the illusion of knowing. "I probably don't know. I think I know, but I probably don't." The willingness to pretend you do not know - and then discover you actually do not - produces deeper insight than pretending you do.
Overestimate Intelligence, Underestimate Context
The Bible Project operates on a principle that applies to all educational content: "People overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence."
Most explanatory writing fails in one of two ways. It assumes the audience already knows the background, producing work that is incomprehensible to outsiders. Or it assumes the audience cannot handle complexity, producing work that is condescending to everyone. The Bible Project threads the needle: provide the context clearly, then trust the audience to think.
The animated videos look accessible. Bright colors, clean character designs, fluid motion. But the content is Ph.D.-level research. As one observer noted: "What looks like a flashy video is undergirded by PhD-level research and gifted artistry." The accessibility is a design choice, not a compromise.
Visual Thinking Clarifies Text
The animation team does not simply illustrate the script. They use visual parallelism to express literary parallelism. When telling stories about Adam and Eve, Moses, and Jesus, the team creates visually parallel compositions showing connections across centuries of narrative.
The artists ask questions that reshape understanding. In a wilderness theme study, the team identified that the plot sequence was visually incoherent. Their questions forced rewrites. The script improved because someone tried to draw it.
This is not unique to animation. Any writer who has tried to diagram their argument knows the experience. The visual representation reveals structural problems that reading alone misses. If you cannot draw the logic, the logic may not hold.
Seven Drafts, Minimum
The iterative process produces seven or more drafts per video. Research. Dialogue. Script. Animation. Revision. More dialogue. More revision. Each contributor - scholar, writer, animator - strengthens the whole.
Mackie prepares extensive notes and research. Then he and Collins spend ten to fifteen hours in dialogue. The script develops through collaborative writing. The animation team receives the script and begins visual development. Multiple revision cycles follow, with artists asking questions that reshape theological understanding.
The willingness to revise this extensively is rare in content production. Most YouTube channels optimize for speed. The Bible Project optimizes for depth. The audience can tell the difference.
The Illusion of Knowing
Collins articulates one of the most useful concepts in education: "We all have this illusion of knowing, where our brains trick us into thinking we understand more than we actually do." Turning this off creates space for genuine curiosity and deeper learning.
The illusion is especially dangerous with familiar texts. People who have heard biblical stories since childhood assume they understand them. The Bible Project's method - asking basic questions, admitting confusion, tracing connections that span hundreds of pages - dissolves that false familiarity.
This applies to any subject. If you think you understand something well, try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it. The gaps in your understanding will surface in the first five minutes. That is where the real learning begins.
Details Matter Deliberately
Biblical authors include seemingly trivial details deliberately. "Why do I need all this detail about the shape of these curtains in the tabernacles?" Because those details "stick in your memory so that they stick out when you're comparing character stories."
The texts are designed for readers who will meditate on them "day and night" for their entire lives, discovering new connections across stories. This is a fundamentally different model of reading than contemporary content consumption. The authors assumed depth. They wrote for rereading.
Mackie describes certainty as not a biblical virtue. The scriptures cultivate trust, not certainty - trust in "surprising ways" of revealing wisdom. Understanding progresses when people "wrestle with" difficult texts rather than expecting immediate clarity.
The Unified Story
The Bible Project's signature insight is demonstrated through the tree of knowing good and bad. God plants a tree in the middle of the garden. Do not eat it, it will kill you. It is called the tree of knowing good and bad. But the humans are made in God's image, meant to rule the earth on God's behalf. You would need knowledge of good and bad for that job. Why put a tree of something you need in the middle of the garden and then forbid it?
The riddle sits unresolved until First Kings 3, hundreds of pages later. Solomon becomes king. God says: ask me for anything. Solomon asks - using the same Hebrew phrase - for the knowledge of good and bad. And God does not refuse. God says: I am so glad that is what you asked for. The connection rewrites the Genesis story retroactively. God was not withholding the knowledge. He was training them how to get it - by asking, by trusting, by receiving it as a gift rather than seizing it. The Bible does not explain this. It just places the two stories where a persistent reader will eventually connect them.
This is the Bible Project's core message: the Bible is a unified story. Not sixty-six separate books. Not a reference manual. A single narrative with internal connections that reward sustained engagement. Their videos make these connections visible through animation - showing visual parallels that readers would miss in text. The audience learns advanced literary analysis without knowing the technical vocabulary. The best analogies, Mackie says, are musical: think of a tight jazz quartet that has been playing together for decades. They know their scales, but in the moment they create something new every time. Biblical authors work on that level of sophistication.
Words Create Reality
Biblical authors treat language as creative force. Genesis opens with God creating through speech - ten words that order all of creation. Jesus says every idle word will be accounted for on the day of reckoning. Words are not merely descriptive. They are generative. A word, Mackie observes, is something invisible in your mind that gets pressed out through your vocal cords, travels through the air, enters another person, and then they know the thing that was in your mind. A word is both you and something that goes out from you and takes on an identity distinct from you. This is why "In the beginning was the Word" works as an image of God: it is with God and is God simultaneously.
The Hebrew concept of hagah - meditation through murmuring, quietly speaking words aloud - represents an ancient media practice. Psalm 1 describes the ideal Bible reader as someone who meditates on scripture day and night. The Hebrew word means literally to mutter or speak quietly. The words enter through the mouth and the ear simultaneously. Augustine's Confessions demonstrates what decades of this practice produce: the Psalms leak out of everything he says. He sang them every day. They were not in his mind. They were in his body.
The Bible's influence on the English language traces back through centuries of translation. Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible. The Pilgrims carried it to the colonies. Figures of speech from Job - "by the skin of our teeth" - entered common speech through the King James translators' decision to keep the Hebrew idiom rather than paraphrase it. But the influence goes deeper than phrases. The idea that a person without power has moral high ground just by being powerless - there is nothing more Hebrew Bible and Jesus than that. Ethical categories that feel self-evident in the West are, Mackie argues, actually biblical in origin.
Key Takeaways
- Pair expertise with genuine curiosity. The scholar-student dynamic produces better content than either alone.
- Overestimate your audience's intelligence. Underestimate their context. Provide background. Trust their minds.
- Use visual thinking to test textual logic. If you cannot draw it, the argument may not hold.
- Revise extensively. Seven drafts is a minimum, not a ceiling.
- Dissolve the illusion of knowing. Familiarity is not understanding.
- Include deliberate details. Readers who return will find what they missed the first time.
- Treat words as generative, not just descriptive. What you write creates something in the reader.
The Bible Project proves that rigorous scholarship, artistic excellence, and accessible communication are not opposing forces. Athens can help you clarify your prose, but only genuine curiosity and respect for your audience can supply what great educational writing requires.
This post draws from Mackie and Collins' appearance on How I Write and the Christianity Today profile of their process. For more on visual storytelling and YouTube education, see Johnny Harris's writing advice.